Dario Bonciani and Joonseok Oh
The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 caused a significant and persistent increase in unemployment rates across major advanced economies. The worsening in labour market conditions increased uncertainty about job prospects, which potentially gave rise to precautionary savings, putting further downward pressure on real economic activity and prices. Moreover, in response to the severe drop in demand, central banks worldwide cut short-term nominal interest rates, which rapidly approached the zero lower bound (ZLB), where they remained for a prolonged time. In a recent paper, we show that committing to keep the interest rate at zero longer than implied by current macroeconomic conditions is particularly effective at easing contractions in demand in the presence of countercyclical unemployment risk and low interest rates.
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